DarkWingDuck7.0 :
See, this is why I don’t think you can just say, “Carbon dating says medieval, case closed.”
Carbon dating is useful, but it depends on the sample you test and what happened to that sample over time. The 1988 test came from one area of the Shroud, and there has been legitimate debate over whether that area was chemically or physically representative of the rest of the cloth. So testing one little section does not automatically settle every question about the entire Shroud.
Then you have the WAXS testing, which stands for Wide Angle X ray Scattering. It is not a laser test and it is not the same thing as carbon dating. It looks at the aging of the cellulose in the linen. That study found results compatible with linen roughly 2,000 years old, assuming certain long term temperature and humidity conditions. So now you have another method pointing toward a much older date than the 1988 carbon test.
Does that prove the Shroud is Jesus’ burial cloth? No. But it absolutely means there is conflicting scientific evidence, so acting like the carbon date ended the discussion is way too simple.
Then there’s the image itself. Researchers from the Shroud of Turin Research Project reported that they could not find paint, pigment, dye, or stain that accounted for the body image. There was even a medieval bishop who claimed an artist had confessed to making it, but he never gave us the artist’s name or demonstrated the method that supposedly produced the image.
And there have been experiments using extremely intense ultraviolet radiation that produced very shallow coloration on linen with some characteristics similar to the Shroud image. That does not prove a radioactive event happened, but it does show why people are still looking at some kind of intense energy as a possible image formation mechanism.
And when I bring up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’m making a comparison, not saying it was the same process. Those blasts produced such intense thermal radiation that objects and people blocked some of that energy and left visible shadow patterns behind. Horrible events, obviously, but they show what an enormous burst of energy can do to a surface.
2026-08-08 15:10:01